abecedarius

8 ms·

31.
by abecedarius 2mo ago
I don't know, I'm not very chemical, but fwiw: a friend and I were favorably impressed with Linus Pauling's general chemistry textbook. It tries to supply enough of the physics for the chemistry to make sense. We only studied
32.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
There's score voting too. I believe approval is the best focal point for this kind of reform because it's the simplest one, simpler even than the status quo. (In UI terms it's switching from radio buttons to checkboxes.) Any
33.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
Really I'm not married to that proposal, I agree some voting reforms like approval voting should help, and I don't think any formal changes are enough on their own to get our political culture out of the current pit. What I like a
34.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
Concentrated interests want legislation favoring them at the expense of the easily-misled public. So what's your model by which repeal becoming less near-impossible makes the net damage from this dynamic greater.
35.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention: > I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I su
36.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
Heh, unintentional. Another term shorter than spelling out "orders of magnitude" is "decades", but I figure that's less familiar and even more confusing here. "Memory price started out falling two decades per d
37.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
Can you blame Moore's Law ending? The graph at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law looks steady up to the 2020s. 1979 to 2009 in the OP graph has a pretty steady drop from 10^7 to 10^1 USD/GB: 6 OO
38.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
National debt to GDP was much lower in the 70s. You might be right that near-term disaster is unlikely, but comparing to a lottery win is ridiculous. Orders of magnitude off.
39.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
It's funny, in the 8-bit days a lot of us learned programming for its own sake without much expectation it'd be lucrative. Took ~50 years to get back to that spirit as the default.
40.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
Permission should be in the form of a capability, which need not end up on the built-in OS network capability. If an app insists on your car's steering wheel, you can be like "sure, kid, here's your Help Daddy Drive(TM)"
41.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
If you're in "everything not banned is subsidized"-land where absolutely everything is political, you need to work on getting out of that hole, not digging it deeper. (I wouldn't assume the Swiss are there yet, but I&#x2
42.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
Has LuaJIT been superseded?
43.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
"I expect they're too expensive" is a terrible reason to ban them, though.
44.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
Antiseptics did make a big difference in the century before antibiotics...
45.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
I thought CF workers could be self-hosted? I haven't tried that system but saw Kenton Varda tweeting about running them locally for development.
46.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
I only spot-checked the section "Problems with Scheme" in the motivation doc and got a similar impression. The last three short paragraphs were reasonable on why not Scheme for this, but they were preceded by a greater bulk of con
47.
by abecedarius 3mo ago
AlphaGo. Reinforcement learning on math with proof assistants was clearly going to be workable after that, even if not right away.
48.
by abecedarius 8mo ago
I'm on your side in this argument (approximately; asking what ethics even is and where it comes from can be productive but shouldn't conclude "and therefore AI agents working with humans don't need to integrate a human m
49.
by abecedarius 8mo ago
Thing is, when you open a webpage it's clear that it may automatically execute code (Javascript, WebAssembly). What needs to be clear (and by default limited) is the authority of that code.
50.
by abecedarius 8mo ago
The Screen of Damocles: could be a market for it.
51.
by abecedarius 8mo ago
Bookies determine the odds and typically refuse to take bets from skilled bettors. A market is open to all, with the odds influenced by all participants. In established betting markets such as for stocks, pros dedicate their careers and the
52.
by abecedarius 8mo ago
A suggestion born of experience: besides printing the seed for an image, add it to the image file as metadata. Otherwise, if you're me, you'll lose it.
53.
by abecedarius 10mo ago
Thanks for explaining. I'm still confused: CakeWallet (and similar) were a reason to doubt the original claim. Are these "popular" wallets rarely used, or are you considering the nodes that they trust as equivalent to your ow
54.
by abecedarius 10mo ago
It was a form of "huh, interesting. I tried to quickly find some more evidence for this but failed." If Claude as search engine were able to link to some backing (maybe like "we estimate around n nodes regularly joining the n
55.
by abecedarius 10mo ago
> running your own node, as most people do. Huh, surprising -- it's very different from most people using most software. (Of course HN is not most people.) I tried to fill myself in by asking Claude Opus neutrally "do most us
56.
by abecedarius 10mo ago
When they changed it is also when they misspelled his name. Opus got it right. I was surprised Stephenson took the misspelling as an AI tell.
57.
ASI existential risk: reconsidering alignment as a goal(michaelnotebook.com)
4 points by abecedarius 1y ago|0 comments
58.
by abecedarius 1y ago
The UCSD system was indeed astonishingly, unusably slow. When I got to try it in high school computer lab, in the 80s, I was like "Did whoever ported it to this particular computer just totally fuck it up? WTF?!" An Infocom advent
59.
by abecedarius 1y ago
Interesting -- you can keep mitochondria alive outside of cells? Are there papers on what they need for that?
60.
by abecedarius 1y ago
Maybe it's better now, but what I ran into in trying twice is that if you're not into installing by "curl | sh", then trying to build from source was an awful experience. It had out of date instructions for installing a

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